Apr 14, 2011

I've been doing a lot of behind the scenes work in the last few weeks, but progress has been a bit slow due to my time being taken up by other factors. The windowing system is good enough now that I shouldn't need to mess with it for quite some time, which is good as I need to concentrate on gameplay related features.

Recently I've been looking at the inventory screen and how the player interacts with items and objects in the world. To this end, I spent some time putting together some better graphics for the inventory screen, (previously I had dodgy placeholders). The visual style of Bulldog is something I've been thinking about for quite some time, and I think I've settled on a look that I'm happy with:

The 2D images above are intended for use in the inventory screen. In the game world itself the plan is to use 3d models shaded in such a way that they take on a similar appearance.

The visual look is heavily based on the style I developed for my web comic, Asleep at the wheel. I haven't posted a new comic in almost two years due to becoming a first-time father. Before the baby came along it was taking me several days to put together a weekly comic and pretty much any random event would disrupt the process enough that the comic would be late, so it simply wasn't going to happen with a newborn added to the mix.

I'm keen to get Bulldog to a good enough state to be able to show off some screenshots some time soon, but there's still a lot that needs to be done before I can do anything like that. These simple in-game icons are a step in the right direction though.